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Gates Securing a Role Under Another President

WASHINGTON — Robert M. Gates spent 115 days on the road last year as President George W. Bush’s defense secretary and the superintendent of the United States’ two wars. He was in Iraq three times, Afghanistan twice, Russia, Kosovo, India, Kyrgyzstan — 26 countries in all.

Not this year. As President Obama’s defense secretary and the lone holdover from the Bush cabinet, Mr. Gates has cut back his trips overseas and is staying close to home.

His advisers say his most important travel now is the two-mile journey he makes almost every day between the Pentagon and the White House, where this canny, deceptively bland Washington master of adaptation — he is a former director of central intelligence who has served eight presidents of both parties — is trying to cement his role in the Obama inner circle.

“He has to get their confidence,” said Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the first President Bush, an outside adviser to the Obama White House and one of Mr. Gates’s closest friends. “It makes everything go smoother and there are less suspicions.”

For now, the daily trips appear to be working. Mr. Gates, a stolid, white-haired son of Wichita who does not look like he could play forward on the new president’s basketball team, has become pivotal to the administration’s overhaul of policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, called Afpak at the White House, which Mr. Obama announced last week.

It was lost on no one during a recent crunch of Afpak meetings in the Situation Room that as the No. 2 at the C.I.A. in the late 1980s, Mr. Gates helped funnel covert Reagan administration aid and weapons through Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, to the Islamic fundamentalists who ousted the Russians from Afghanistan.

Some of those same fundamentalists are now enemies of the United States trying to overthrow the government in Kabul, a disastrous consequence that produced the problem the Obama administration confronts today. At the same time, American officials say a wing of the ISI is providing money and military aid to the Taliban.

Mr. Gates does know jihad from both sides.

“Bob has enormous influence because of his experience,” said Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, who first worked with Mr. Gates when both were in the Carter administration. “We talk about Pakistan, and he can say, ‘You know, when I was at the C.I.A., I worked directly with the ISI in this way.’ He has the greatest continuity of experience in Afpak of any official. And he has seen the good, the bad and the ugly up close.”

White House officials say Mr. Gates has an authority and rapport with Mr. Obama that exceeds his low wattage in public. People who know both men say they share an analytic, deliberative approach to national security — Mr. Gates has a Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet history from Georgetown University — and have found common ground in a centrist foreign policy reminiscent of one they both admire, that of the first President George Bush.

During the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama said he had “enormous sympathy” for the foreign policy of Mr. Bush, particularly his handling of the 1991 Persian Gulf war and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mr. Gates, who declined to be interviewed, served the first President Bush as deputy national security adviser and director of central intelligence, and is described by members of both parties as a nonideological pragmatist.

Denis McDonough, one of Mr. Obama’s top foreign policy aides, said that a factor in Mr. Obama’s decision to ask Mr. Gates, a Republican, to stay on in the job was a speech Mr. Gates gave in 2007, when he called for more money for the State Department and said the United States had to use economic development in fighting threats abroad. “One of the most important lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan,” Mr. Gates said then, “is that military success is not sufficient to win.”

This past week, as Mr. Gates stood behind Mr. Obama during the announcement of the Afpak plan, his pragmatist fingerprints were evident: The strategy broadened the effort to include more troops and civilian development experts but narrowed the goal from the second President Bush’s “flourishing democracy” to one this White House (and Mr. Gates) consider more realistic, denying Al Qaeda and its allies a safe haven in the region.

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In the internal debate over the plan, Mr. Gates pressed for and got 4,000 additional troops, but only as trainers, and he and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed to put off any decision to order more combat forces until the end of the year.

The deal was consistent with Mr. Gates’s view that United States should not have a large footprint in Afghanistan and what friends say is his discomfort with lofty democracy rhetoric. “If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose,” Mr. Gates recently told Congress.

The remark ricocheted around the city as a startling break from the second President Bush, but it was also a departure from Mr. Obama’s comments during the campaign when he spoke grandly of rebuilding Afghanistan’s civil institutions. Friends say that Mr. Gates’s thinking may have been a factor in bringing Mr. Obama’s goals down to earth or at the very least that there was a meeting of minds.

“Who got there first, I don’t know,” said Lee Hamilton, president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, “but they really have sought a kind of middle ground between making Afghanistan a model of democracy and stability on the one hand, and a slide into chaos on the other.”

Friends say they expect that Mr. Gates, 65, will stay on as Mr. Obama’s defense secretary beyond a single year, his expected tenure when Mr. Obama appointed him. Still, Mr. Gates’s wife continues to spend six months of the year at their home near Seattle. Mr. Gates has made no secret of his distaste for Washington, where in 1991 confirmation hearings for intelligence chief he was accused of politicizing Reagan-era intelligence and exaggerating the Soviet threat. These days he lives a life of take-out food and briefing books in a home at a small military compound near the State Department.

Mr. Gates has been careful about comparing his two most recent bosses, although on a recent appearance on the NBC program “Meet the Press” he called Mr. Obama “somewhat more analytical” than Mr. Bush.

Still, Mr. Gates’s advisers say he has no illusions of how difficult Afghanistan will be.

“The White House is a poignant place,” Mr. Gates wrote in his 1996 memoir, “From the Shadows.” He added: “It seems to me that for those who live and work there, if they are completely honest with themselves, with rare exception the most vivid memories are not of victory but of crisis and defeat — and, for a fortunate few, of one or two occasions of historical importance.”

A version of this news analysis appears in print on , on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Sticking Close to Home, Gates Solidifies Position in Obama’s Inner Circle. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe